Cat and Shanmao's blog

Listened this past Sunday to Work With Marty Nemko, a career counselling radio show hosted by Marty Nemko on a local station. His format sometimes has an interview with an author or other person of career related interest. The format also includes "3 minute career makeovers", calls from listeners where he tries to quickly provide career advice. Marty is also fond of providing relationship advice since he believes that along with your job, your romantic relationships is another big factor in your well-being (or ill-being).

This Sunday the whole hour was devoted to interviewing John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.

Perkins described himself as a former economist who's job was to go to 3rd world countries, convince the leaders to take on national debt to be spent on American development such as infrastructure building, with the result that the countries could never afford to pay off the debt and were pressured to give up natural resources in exchange. This was the nice guy approach to working with these countries. The backup heavy-handed plan in case the leaders didn't buy in and were thus susceptible to nationalism or moving to the left was to have some kind of coup.

Motivated by guilt he wrote this book exposing his former career.

I am sympathetic to his ideas but don't agree with every point he made.

Looking back at the recent coup attempt in Venezuela, I marvel at the blatant warnings that the US provided. A democratically elected leader, Hugo Chavez, was ousted by a group of rivals and miraculously scrambled back to power a few days later. Condoleeza Rice arrogantly warned him that he was lucky and hoped he had learned his lesson with the implication that they were hoping for his successful replacement. This from a country that at various times pushes democracy (with a pinch of freedom thrown in for good luck).